Sublime

Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men’s lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me.

At age fifty he viewed himself, after publication of two books of nonfiction, one on the war, the other a personal account of the Irish troubles, plus the short story collection and innumerable articles for national magazines, as a conundrum, a man unable to define his commitment or understand the secret of his own navel, a literary gnome. He

“An illness which has long hung about me in all probability will speedily send me beyond that bourne whence no traveler returns.” Even on his deathbed, Burns could turn a phrase. Within a few decades of Burns’s death,

August 1876, and Walker died two months later. He was seventy-seven years old. The cause of death, says Bil Gilbert, was nothing more or less than ‘having lived long enough’. How to distil that life into six lines, containing

Geographical curiosity and his abiding love for wilderness travel seem to have been the main reasons for these journeys, but he usually managed to find some practical, economic rationale: a railroad survey, a party of miners that wanted to be guided to some remote mountain range, a potential livestock market that called for investigation. In 1858

Douglas Pavlicek works a clear-cut as big as downtown Eugene, saying goodbye to his plants as he tucks each one in. Hang on. Only ten or twenty decades. Child’s play, for you guys. You just have to outlast us. Then no one will be left to fuck you over.

In time, two great strokes will lay the lawyer low, reducing all aspens, birches, beeches, pines, oaks, and maples to a single word that will take him half a minute to pronounce.

ursine.